Planting Seeds: The Jurlique Herb Farm Concert Series

The ensuing years were challenging. A domestic market for this kind of product did not yet exist, and for five years more than ninety-five per cent of Jurlique’s production was exported to the US. Over the next twenty years, outside recognition slowly began to trickle down into Australia.

‘Even though we’d purchased the Ngeringa Farm to produce Jurlique herbs, the connection was immediately there to make it a place of music, of culture,’ Ulrike recalls. ‘The previous owners had built a seminar room with a fully equipped kitchen to preserve the produce they had grown. That’s actually the starting point of the Jurlique Herb Farm Concerts. I saw the seminar room and thought: fantastic! A concert room!’

The modest building was quickly transformed into a makeshift concert hall. The kitchen became a green room, and a mud-brick building adjacent to the seminar room became the designated space for afternoon tea during the intervals. ‘It was really nostalgic, this mud-brick building with blue frames! People said, “Ulrike, we hope you never change it!”’

The intimacy of the venue, the beauty of the landscape and the calibre of the artists she engaged to perform enabled the series to develop a loyal following. By 2004 – at which point Jurlique was already an internationally acclaimed label – the Kleins were ready for a period of renewal. They sold the majority of their shares, and Ulrike’s involvement with the company slowly decreased, but the Jurlique Herb Farm concerts continued.

A few years later, the walkway between the concert room and mud-brick building began to decay, and was in danger of collapsing. Renovations had to be made if the concerts were to continue. Ulrike engaged carpenter Andy Skewes to help. His advice was direct, honest.

‘Look Ulrike,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing to renovate. If you want my opinion, start fresh.’ Bewildered, Ulrike hardly knew where to begin. Thankfully, Andy put her in touch with an architect – someone he thought might be able to help. The architect turned out to be Anton Johnson, who would later go on to design the UKARIA Cultural Centre.

The timing was serendipitous. It was 2009, and Ulrike had just embarked on a project to acquire a matched set of eighteenth-century Italian string instruments crafted by Giovanni Battista Guadagnini (1711–1786) for the Australian String Quartet. In order to allow people to make taxdeductible donations, a foundation with the correct legal structure needed to be set up – a process that took over eighteen months to complete. Once in the foundation, the future of the Guadagnini instruments would be secure: they could never be resold, and would be available to Australian musicians in perpetuity.

‘When I applied for the DGR-1 status, I knew we wouldn’t get it just by saying we’d purchase these instruments,’ Ulrike says. ‘I don’t know where I plucked it from, but I said alright, I will build a Cultural Centre.’ She created the Ngeringa Farm Arts Foundation (now known as UKARIA), and in October 2010 it was granted DGR-1 status as a public cultural organisation. At the time, she had no inkling of what this ‘Cultural Centre’ might be, nor what it would become. But the seed had already been planted.